Congressional Power - Congress and the end of the cold war

The end of the Cold War broke down the established pattern of
legislative-executive relations. The Cold War's conclusion
accelerated the trend, which began with Vietnam and Watergate, of
diminishing the federal government's role in the everyday lives of
most Americans. The new international environment forced members of both
branches to search for new ideological approaches to world affairs. And it
coincided with—and perhaps contributed to—the most extended
period of divided government (with one party controlling Congress and
another the presidency) in American history.

Most academics and politicians had predicted that the end of the Cold War
would establish a more consistent congressional presence in U.S. foreign
policy because the threat of immediate nuclear attack had so dramatically
receded. But the first post–Cold War president, George H. W. Bush,
defied expectations, even though he faced a Congress controlled by
Democrats for his entire term. Encouraged by his White House counsel, C.
Boyden Gray, Bush proved extraordinarily aggressive at defending (and
enlarging) executive prerogatives, using vetoes and especially
presidential signing statements to outline a vision of presidential power
whose scope would have stunned even a figure like Alexander Hamilton. A
sign of his intentions came in his first year, when he sent marines to
Panama in 1989—without congressional authorization—to remove
from power and arrest Panamanian president Manuel Noriega, who was wanted
in the United States on drug charges. Bush also rejected congressional
attempts to influence policy toward the People's Republic of China,
consistently vetoing bills to tighten sanctions on the Beijing regime
after the Tiananmen Square crackdown against student dissidents.

Congressional Democrats, who generally outmaneuvered Bush on domestic
issues, had more difficulty in adjusting to the post–Cold War
environment. The new Senate majority leader, Maine senator George
Mitchell, was a former judge and believed that framework legislation, if
properly used, would allow Congress to play a greater foreign policy role.
The run-up to the Gulf War of 1991 put this thesis to the test. After
Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush,
acting in concert with U.S. allies, eventually sent 250,000 troops to
Saudi Arabia as part of Operation Desert Shield. But, citing the
measure's unconstitutionality, Bush refused to invoke the War
Powers Act. After the 1990 midterm elections, the administration moved
another quarter million U.S. forces into the region, clearly anticipating
the possibility of offensive action. Bush officials suggested that the
president would go to war with Iraq without requesting a declaration of
war from Congress, citing his power as commander in chief.

Led by Mike Synar, a group of House Democrats petitioned the Supreme Court
for redress. But in line with precedent, the Court declined to involve
itself in foreign policy battles between the executive and legislative
branches. (Indeed, the few decisions the high court did render on
international issues, such as the 1983 ruling
Immigration and Naturalization Service
v.
Chadha,
which ruled the one-house legislative veto unconstitutional, tended to
weaken congressional influence.) Although Synar's effort failed,
political pressure eventually persuaded Bush to submit a bill authorizing
him to use force. The president did so, however, only days short of an
announced deadline to initiate offensive action and with more than 500,000
U.S. troops stationed along the Iraq–Saudi Arabia border. In such
an environment it came as little surprise that Congress supported the war
declaration; perhaps the real shock came in the forty-seven senators who
opposed the resolution.

The record regarding congressional power after the Gulf War was somewhat
mixed. Like his predecessor, William Jefferson Clinton struggled with the
effects of divided government: a crushing defeat in the 1994 midterm
elections brought Republicans to power in both the House and the Senate.
Moreover, unlike the Mitchell-led congressional Democrats during the Bush
administration, the new GOP majority was fairly united ideologically and
was determined to use congressional power to implement its agenda. Clinton
experienced difficulties with Congress almost from the start of his
administration. Legislative pressure in part forced the administration to
reverse itself on issues ranging from Clinton's commitment to end
discrimination against gays in the military to the president's
decision to continue an ill-conceived humanitarian intervention in
Somalia. Even the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in
1993, Clinton's first legislative victory on a foreign policy
matter (and, in many ways, the only significant one of his administration)
came only after a bloody fight with Congress.

After 1994, a condition of almost permanent hostility between the
president and Congress developed. Congressional Republicans offered a
multifaceted program that coalesced into an unusually powerful—and
effective—critique of the executive's approach to world
affairs. Ideologically, the congressional Republicans had several basic
viewpoints that reinforced each other. Some GOP legislators seemed eager
to revive the Cold War, embracing a vehement anticommunism and supporting
hard-line policies toward China, Cuba, and North Korea. Moreover, led by
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, the congressional Republicans used
Congress's power of the purse to prevent the scaling back of the
Pentagon budget, partly for ideological reasons, partly due to a desire to
funnel defense dollars to their home districts or states. From another
angle, Republicans such as House Majority Leader Richard Armey of Texas
boasted of their lack of overseas travel and espoused an
anti-internationalism that targeted organizations like the United Nations.
Most of the new wave of congressional Republicans also opposed overseas
interventions—like Clinton's actions in Haiti and the
Balkans—which they viewed as Wilsonian in theory.

Three other factors made the congressional power exercised by the 1990s
GOP somewhat unusual. First, after their opposition to the Gulf War,
congressional Democrats, for the previous forty years the more active of
the two parties in seeking to utilize congressional power, all but ceased
involvement on matters relating to foreign affairs. Second, after a series
of weak leaders following the 1974 defeat of J. William Fulbright, the
Foreign Relations Committee returned to a higher profile under the
stewardship of the North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, whose aggressive
posture made him a factor on virtually all international questions during
the Clinton administration. Finally, the extreme distaste most
congressional Republicans felt for Clinton gave party members a political
incentive to oppose executive authority in foreign policy, as when
Congress refused to renew Clinton's authority to
"fast-track" trade agreements, a luxury enjoyed by every
president since the passage of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in
1934.

Still, the performance of the congressional GOP sometimes failed to live
up to its rhetoric. For example, while Clinton's ability to
negotiate tariff deals was impeded, he acted unilaterally and in
opposition to the stated congressional position when he intervened to prop
up the Mexican peso in 1995. Similarly, in the midst of the war in Kosovo,
he initiated hostilities without formally consulting Congress and then
ignored GOP-sponsored legislation that seemed to call for him to terminate
the operation. Regardless of the precise balance between the two branches
at the end of the twentieth century, however, older patterns in
congressional power remained in place: the role of the appropriations
process and other unconventional methods in measuring the congressional
presence in conducting U.S. foreign policy; the importance of party
divisions in shaping attitudes toward the congressional role in world
affairs; and the tendency of Congress to offer more ideologically extreme
viewpoints on international matters than did the executive.